Note: This was supposed to post on Thursday, but Mia was traveling so she scheduled its posting and she’s also an idiot who scheduled it on the road day… Sorry, Mark and Daniel, but here it is now!

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Welcome back to Mark Knight! This time he comes with a guest: Daniel, his main character in Blood Family. Hello to you both!

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Mia: What is the name of the book where we’ll find you? Can you tell us a little about it?
Daniel: The book is called Blood Family ~ Quest for the Vampire Key, by Mark Knight. It’s the perfect title; it really sums up what happened to me in those crazy months. You’ll see the book on Amazon. All the Amazons – Amazon US, Amazon, UK, and others.

Mia: Tell us a little about yourself. Where do you fit into the story? What should we know about you?
Daniel: I was seventeen when I found out that my world wasn’t what I thought it was. I was just rolling along, you know? Finished High School, got myself an okay job turning wrenches for the local greasy monkey, hung out with my friends. I live near Boston with my Mom and Dad. Mom is cool. Never have the best relationship with my father, though. He’s a pastor at a local church. He’s kind of strict. Always felt that I wasn’t so much his son as some dirt that he couldn’t scrape off his shoe.

Then a weird package was left for me at my door. I took it to my room and opened it. It was glass sphere – full of something red, dark, and pulsating. Turned out it was blood. It exploded all over my room, and me. Got into my mouth and throat. And that was when the s**t really hit the fan. It changed me. I had a kind of vision, had this voice speak to me. He said he was my real father and that my Mom and Dad had lied to me—about everything. Turned out my real father was a vampire, and not just any vampire. He was the king bloodsucker, the ruler. And I was his son.

Mia: What do you think of the author? Be honest. We won’t tell.
Daniel: I’ve run across a lot of weird stuff since this rollercoaster ride began. Vampires, other dimensions, possessed animals, you name it. But finding out that there is some guy writing about me and all that’s happened to me – that’s the freakiest of all. But I read the book; he’s got me down pat. It’s the real me. Everything I was thinking and feeling as my life was turning upside down, as the vampire powers inside me were coming out – he got it exactly right. Now anyone who reads about my search for the Key will know exactly what it was like for me. They’ll get inside my head. And that’s great. People will know what I was going through.

Mia: How do you feel about the story you’re in?
Daniel: My life was pretty random before any of this happened. After school finished, it was just work, friends, girlfriend, home. Chugging beer. Smoking the occasional joint. And that was all I wanted. I was going nowhere, but just had no motivation to do anything about it. But when I found out that my true father was a vampire and my real mother had been imprisoned by him, I left home and ended up in deep the forests of Chiapas in Mexico and then on to the spooky moors of southern England. I had to find and free my birth mother. And I knew that if I tried to do that, I would probably have to go head-to-head with my vampire father. But I had to know who I really was. I wasn’t the same Daniel any more. I wasn’t that lazy goof-off who just wanted to waste time and get wasted. I was changing into something else, something powerful. I was on a mission.

Mia: Do you like being a character in the book?
Daniel: Hmm. I guess you could call me the main character. All the crazy stuff that happens is because I go on this journey. Sure, I leave my family, my friends, my girlfriend, but I found new friends. When got to England, looking for my mother, I teamed up with a young woman named Logan DuPris. She is a vampire hunter, and tough as nails. She’s a little bit older than me, but that didn’t stop us developing an attraction to one another. We joined forces and then set out together to discover what happened to my birth mother, and along the way we discovered a lot about ourselves, if you know what I mean. So, yeah, I really like being the main character. My actions set a lot of things into motions. Some bad stuff, some good stuff. But meeting Logan was definitely one of the good things.

Mia: How do you see your future? Without giving anything away about the story, naturally.
Daniel: Now that I know that I am a dhampir—a half-vampire—I know that my future isn’t going to be ordinary. I have vampire powers like strength, speed, and a this kind of intense hypnotism thing I can do. But there are other powers too, powers I never would have expected. Like the ability to heal. Logan says that no one really has the lowdown on dhampirs, even how long they live. I might have even more powers that haven’t emerged yet. One thing I will say, since leaving home to search for my mother, everything has changed.

Mia: What do you know about your author’s plans? Can we expect to see you in any future stories?
Daniel: All the crazy stuff that happened to me in Blood Family sure didn’t stop after the last page! It was only the beginning. But, yeah, I think Mr. Knight is writing about what happened next.

Mia: Let’s say they make a movie about this book. Who do you want to play you, and why?
Daniel: Wow, I’ve never been asked anything like that before. I try to keep up with movies, but it’s hard with all the strange things going on in my life. Logan tells me that there is an actor who reminds her a lot of me, his name is Thomas Dekker. She says he has that brooding quality that I have, whatever that means. He was in Heroes and the Sarah Connor Chronicles series. Never seen those; I’m more of a CSI person!

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Author Bio: Mark Knight grew up in Massachusetts, USA. Settling in the UK, Mark continued to write novels of differing genres, including horror and television scripts. Mark has worked on scripts for Hollywood’s Little Slices of Death production company and one for Illusion Studios, for which he has recently signed an Option Acquisition Agreement. He also won several short story competitions, and has had his work featured in published anthologies. Mark concentrates now on Young Adult urban fantasy novels.